Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.